Pluralism in practice Teaching with and without AI

Pluralism in practice
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The Pluralistic Universe of Michael Pollan AI Log reviews A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness

William James offers Pollan an expansive view, one that includes scientists measuring brain activity and novelists writing their characters’ subjective streams and biologists building weird robots and philosophers getting high on nitrous oxide while reading Hegel.

Yellow-breeched philosophy, or writing like a humble bee AI Log reviews The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game

This review of The Score by @add-hawk.bsky.social kicks off from Henry Farrell calling it “a book that absolutely ought not work, for the same structural reasons that bumblebees ought not be able to fly. The aerodynamics are all wrong. But good god, does it fly.” open.substack.com/pub/ailogblo...

Writing about getting to the Funnery Learning about AI through teaching about it

I taught a course last fall titled "How AI is changing higher education." I had a blast. Trey Popp wrote about it.

Writing about getting to the Funnery
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On the use of historical analogies in writing about AI Something big is happening, but how do we describe it?

Reading all the analogies about how the feelings just before the Covid shutdown in 2020 are like the feelings people have about Claude Code sent me back to William S. Burroughs, Laurie Anderson, and my favorite music video from the 1980s.

Language is a virus.

open.substack.com/pub/ailogblo...

Ancient wisdom and evitable futures On reading Plato and Mark Carney

Carney's speech showed that reading all of Thucydides's Melian Dialogue gives new meaning to “the strong do what they will, while the weak suffer what they must.”

Similar wisdom is available to those who read all of Plato’s Phaedrus, and not just the famous bits.

open.substack.com/pub/ailogblo...

Disenshittify U AI Log reviews Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It

Maybe it’s not so much about touching grass as it is about touching code. Cory Doctorow uses a bad word repeatedly to argue we need to clean the systems that have turned the internet into a cesspit.

Disenshittify U
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Appreciating Rotten and Good Is there anyone better at using the essay form to understand the experience of living and working within the institutional constraints of the modern research university than Rafe Meager?

My frustration at what feels like an increasing flow of LLM-generated words through my various feeds inspired me to write something. Not another hand-wringer about AI slop...This one celebrates my favorite discovery on Substack.

Appreciating Rotten and Good
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Thanks, Andy. Glad it spoke to you!

Disanthropomorphize Chat Language without mind and the ends of OpenAI

Disanthropomorphize Chat
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Language machines as educational technology Alternatives to language-as-a-service

When it comes to teaching, we don’t need intelligent tools; stupid ones might come in handy.

Language machines as educational technology
www.ailog.blog/p/language-m...

Language machines as spiritual tools Alternatives to Language-as-a-Service

As Silicon Valley “pivots” from building God to upselling their office productivity suites, I wonder if there are better uses for language machines than writing faster emails and summarizing pointless meetings.

Language machines as spiritual tools
www.ailog.blog/p/language-m...

Its an antimeme! It cannot be read unless you change your perspective.

Language Machines as Antimeme AI Log reviews Language Machines: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism

Large language models are language machines, and we need to think about what they do with language as more than just "mathy math."

Language Machines as Antimeme
www.ailog.blog/p/language-m...

Trump offers carrots to nine universities And why Chad Orzel has me worried

@orzelc.bsky.social has become one of my favorite higher education writers of late. But he is importantly wrong when he disagrees with Timothy Burke’s description of “the deal” offered to nine universities.

Trump offers carrots to nine universities
www.ailog.blog/p/trump-offe...

It's not chickens all the way down Higher education leadership in this moment of crisis

Why were so many university presidents and boards quick to undermine the principles and practice of academic freedom this past week? The answer has to do with who runs institutions of higher education, and how they think and don’t think about their work.

www.ailog.blog/p/its-not-ch...

What comes after the chatbot? Notes and image credits for my talk at the AAC&U AI Institute

This essay is better than the talk I gave at AC&U 2025-26 Institute on AI, Pedagogy, and the Curriculum on Friday because it reflects the collective intelligence of those who asked questions and made comments.

What comes after the chatbot?
www.ailog.blog/p/what-comes...

A Revery Entertained by the Intellectual Class: Dewey and Lippmann Revisted AI Log Reviews Superbloom, Part Two

The Lippmann-Dewey debate is a meme created in the 1980s, and used ever since to talk about a question intellectuals find endlessly fascinating: wouldn’t it be better if intellectuals ran things?

Lippmann called this “as complete a delusion as perpetual motion.”

www.ailog.blog/p/a-revery-e...

With a Certain Pathetic Moderation: AI as a New Social Medium AI Log reviews Superbloom by Nicholas Carr

Nicholas Carr’s Superbloom brings to light our longstanding cultural habit of enthusiastically greeting each new social technology. You may be surprised to learn that this cycle goes back a ways.

With a Certain Pathetic Moderation: AI as a New Social Medium
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The Banal Evil of AI Safety Chatbot companies are harmful and dishonest. How can we hold them accountable?

Ben Recht says it clearly and plainly. The way this technology is being commercialized matters. OpenAI is the worst. Courts should punish them. Consumers should boycott them. No educational institution should do business with them.

The Banal Evil of AI Safety
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Five things I have learned writing AI Log + Phase 2 begins AI Log turns two years old and I celebrate with a listicle and a public declaration about my next writing project

𝐀𝐈 𝐋𝐨𝐠 turns two years old tomorrow. To celebrate, I made a listicle and decided to reveal Phase 2 of my plan.

Five things I have learned writing AI Log + Phase 2 begins
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Get Me to the Funnery An introduction to the course I will be teaching this fall about How AI Is Changing Higher Education.

I will teach a class enrolling only first-year undergraduates this fall for the first time in years. We're going to have some fun reading, writing, and talking about AI.

Shakespeare helped me figure out how to start things off.

Get Me to the Funnery
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Caricature-style illustration of a humanoid robot resembling a man, wearing thick black glasses and a green quarter-zip sweater with “LPS” on the chest. The robot holds an orange pencil upright in its right hand and a wooden stick in its left. Overlaid white text reads: “…give ourselves permission to experiment…” followed by “Part 2 of an interview with Rob Nelson.

here's part 2 of the conversation with @ailogblog.bsky.social & the conversations he's looking to have with #highereducation institutions about #GenAI

aiedusimplified.substack.com/p/give-ourse...

#AIEdu #EdTech

A man wearing glasses and a dark green quarter-zip shirt with the yellow letters "LPS" gestures with his right hand raised. Overlaid text reads: '"...In the mode of 'we don't know'" Part 1 of an interview with Rob Nelson.'

Part 1 of a conversation with the great, @ailogblog.bsky.social about what he's doing in the classroom around #GenAI

#HigherEd #AIEdu #EdTech #Teaching

aiedusimplified.substack.com/p/in-the-mod...

To what problem is the modern American university a solution? AI Log reviews "Dartmouth College V. Woodward: Colleges, Corporations, and the Common Good" by Adam R. Nelson

This is not the first time newly elected Republicans have interested themselves in the affairs of universities and colleges. In 1819, we got corporate personhood redefined. What will get we get this time?

To what problem is the modern American university a solution?
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Three bad ideas that are good for US higher education Logpodge #10 is all about strawberry statements. Columbia could use leaders like Herbert Deane today. At least he had the courage of his anti-democratic convictions and spoke the truth.

"A university is definitely not a democratic institution" is truer today than when Dean Herbert Deane said it in 1968, and more true of Columbia than it was a week ago.

Three bad ideas that are good for US higher education
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Small matters Logpodge #9 When it comes to AI in education, models, teams, and ambitions should be small

Small matters
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A Phaedrus Moment If Socrates was right, what do we make of Claude?

Socrates comes to mind when I am urged to teach AI literacy. There is a rumor, likely false, that Socrates himself was illiterate. Maybe he chose not to read and write, so great was his commitment to the kind of conversational back and forth we named after him.

www.ailog.blog/p/a-phaedrus...

Spreadsheet, Not Skynet: Microdoses, Not Microprocessors The modest power relative to the size of the economy of GPT LLM MAMLMs as linguistic artifacts. Of course, since the economy is super huge, a relatively modest effect on it is still huge one. But...

Brad DeLong posted a double shot of analysis of what he calls Modern Advanced Machine Learning Models (MAMLMs). An excellent overview of the economic and organizational impact of this new cultural technology.

Spreadsheet, Not Skynet: Microdoses, Not Microprocessors open.substack.com/pub/braddelo...

After the AI bubble: ChatGPT as an off-modern educational technology What does generative AI teach us by being weird?

A defining characteristic of large AI models is to spiral or zigzag, introducing errors that no human would make. It is a better Clippy, a better tutor, and a better Eliza, except when it isn’t.

After the AI bubble: ChatGPT as an off-modern educational technology www.ailog.blog/p/after-the-...